Utilizing techniques from Freud’s contemporaneous psychoanalysis, the surrealists viewed the First World War as a societal “nervous breakdown” in an explosion of aggression.
These artists descended into the unconscious mind, producing art with dreamlike juxtapositions.
However irrational their results, they had hoped that by giving free artistic expression to repressed desire, they could channel the aggression of the war harmlessly into their art, poetry, film and performance.
Dennis Raverty is a speaker, author and art historian who for decades has delighted audiences with lively presentations at libraries, churches, synagogues, hostels and business lunches on a variety of topics in the history of art, from the Italian Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance.
His articles and criticism have appeared inArt Journal, Art in America, The International Review of African American Art, Art Criticism, The New Art Examiner, Prospects: An Annual of American Studies, Source: Notes in the History of Art, and Art Papers, where he was a contributing editor.
He authored four entries for the most recent edition of the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, published by Oxford University Press in 2011.
This lecture will be at the Great Neck Library Community Room, located at 159 Bayview Ave. in Great Neck on Thursday, Oct. 31 at 1 p.m.
No registration is required. For more information, please contact the Great Neck Library at (516) 466-8055 or email adultprogramming@greatnecklibrary.org.
